“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.” -- Zig Ziglar

Here is my collection of 101 Proven Practices for Focus. It still needs work to improve it, but I wanted to shared it, as is, because focus is one of the most important skills we can develop for work and life.

Focus is the backbone of personal effectiveness, personal development, productivity, time management, leadership skills, and just about anything that matters. Focus is a key ingredient to helping us achieve the things we set out to do, and to learn the things we need to learn.

Without focus, we can’t achieve great results.

I have a very healthy respect for the power of focus to amplify impact, to create amazing breakthroughs, and to make things happen.

The Power of Focus

Long ago one of my most impactful mentors said that focus is what separates the best from the rest. In all of his experience, what exceptional people had, that others did not, was focus.

Here are a few relevant definitions of focus: A main purpose or interest. A center of interest or activity. Close or narrow attention; concentration.

I think of focus simply as the skill or ability to direct and hold our attention.

Focus is a Skill

Too many people think of focus as something either you are good at, or you are not. It’s just like delayed gratification.

Focus is a skill you can build.

Focus is actually a skill and you can develop it. In fact, you can develop it quite a bit. For example, I helped a colleague get themselves off of their ADD medication by learning some new ways to retrain their brain. It turned out that the medication only helped so much, the side effects sucked, and in the end, what they really needed was coping mechanisms for their mind, to better direct and hold their attention.

Here’s the surprise, though. You can actually learn how to direct your attention very quickly. Simply ask new questions. You can direct your attention by asking questions. If you want to change your focus, change the question.

Wiggle your toes – it’s a fast way to bring yourself back to the present

Write down your goals

Write down your steps

Write down your tasks

Write down your thoughts

Work when you are most comfortable

When you go through the 101 Proven Practices for Focus, don’t expect it to be perfect. It’s a work in progress. Some of the practices for focus need to be fleshed out better. There is also some duplication and overlap, as I re-organize the list and find better ways to group and label ideas.

In the future, I’m going to revamp this collection to have some more precision, better naming, and some links to relevant quotes, and some science where possible. There is a lot more relevant science that explains why some of these techniques work, and why some work so well.

What’s important is that you find the practices that resonate for you, and the things that you can actually practice.

Getting Started

You might find that from all the practices, only one or two really resonate, or help you change your game. And, that’s great. The idea of having a large list to select from is that it’s more to choose from. The bigger your toolbox, the more you can choose the right tool for the job. If you only have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

If you don’t consider yourself an expert in focus, that’s fine. Everybody has to start somewhere. In fact, you might even use one of the practices to help you get better: Rate your focus each day.

Simply rate yourself, on a scale of 1-10, where 10 is awesome and 1 means you’re a squirrel with a sugar high, dazed and confused, and chasing all the shiny objects that come into site. And then see if your focus improves over the course of a week.

If you adopt just one practice, try either Align your focus and your values or Ask new questions to change your focus.

Feel Free to Share It With Friends

The ability to focus is really a challenge for a lot of people. The answer to improve your attention and focus is through proven practices, techniques, and skill building. Too many people hope the answer lies in a pill, but pills don’t teach you skills.

Even if you struggle a bit in the beginning, remind yourself that growth feels awkward. You' will get better with practice. Practice deliberately. In fact, the side benefit of focusing on improving your focus, is, well, you guessed it … you’ll improve your focus.

What we focus on expands, and the more we focus our attention, and apply deliberate practice, the deeper our ability to focus will grow.

“Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.”

Positive Thinking Can Help You Defeat Learned Helplessness

Actually, there’s a more important reason for positive thinking:

It’s how you avoid learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness is where you give up, because you don’t think you have any control over the situation, or what happens in your life. You explain negative situations as permanent, personal, and pervasive, instead of temporary, situational, and specific.

That’s a big deal.

If you fall into the learned helplessness trap, you spiral down. You stop taking action. After all, why take action, if it won’t matter. And, this can lead to depression.

But that’s a tale of woe for others, not you. Because you know how to defeat learned helplessness and how to build the skill of learned optimism.

You can do it by reducing negative thinking, and by practicing positive thinking. And what better way to improve your positive thinking, than through positive thinking quotes.

Keep a Few Favorite Positive Thinking Quotes Handy

Always keep a few positive thinking quotes at your fingertips so that they are there when you need them.

“I want to work in a place where everybody gets more meaning out of their work on an everyday basis.

I want each of us to give ourselves permission to be able to move things forward. Each of us sometimes overestimate the power others have to do things vs. our own ability to make things happen.

Challenge Yourself to New Levels of Positive Thinking through Positive Quotes

As you explore the positive thinking quotes collection, try to find the quotes that challenge you the most, that really make you think, and give you a new way to generate more positive thoughts in your worst situations.

In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."

You can use your daily trials and tribulations in the workplace as your personal dojo to practice and build your positive thinking skills.

The more positivity you can bring to the table, the more you’ll empower yourself in ways you never thought possible.

As you get tested by your worst scenarios, it’s good to keep in mind, the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."

I’ll also point out that as you grow your toolbox of positive thinking quotes and you build your positive thinking skills, you need to also focus on taking positive action.

Don’t just imagine a better garden, get out and actually weed it.

Don’t Just Imagine Everything Going Well – Imagine How You’ll Deal with the Challenges

Here’s another important tip about positivity and positive thinking …

If you use visualization as part of your approach to getting results, it’s important to include dealing with setbacks and challenges. It’s actually more effective to imagine the most likely challenges coming up, and walking through how you’ll deal with them, if they occur. This is way more effective than just picturing the perfect plan where everything goes without a hitch.

The reality is things happen, stuff comes up, and setbacks occur.

But your ability to mentally prepare for the setbacks, and have a plan of action, will make you much more effective in dealing with the challenge that actually do occur. This will help you respond vs. react in more situations, and to stay in a better place mentally while you evaluate options, and decide a course of action. (Winging it under stress doesn’t work very well because we shut down our prefrontal cortex – the smart part of our brain – when we go into flight-or-fight mode.)

One of the ways we challenge people is to ask, do you want to move to the Cloud, use the Cloud, or be the Cloud?

But to answer that well, you need to really be grounded in your vision for the future, and the role you wan to play.

The Cloud creates a brave new world. It enables and powers the Digital Economy.

Businesses need to cross the Cloud chasm (and some don’t make it) in an effort to stay relevant and to be what’s next.

Businesses need to re-imagine themselves and explore the art of the possible.

Business leaders and IT leaders need to help others forge their way forward in the Digital Frontier.

And it all starts with a story.

A story that inspires the hearts and minds so people can wrap their head around the challenge and the change.

I think Satya says the Microsoft story for the Cloud in a very simple and compelling way:

"We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more." -- Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

That’s a pretty simple and yet pretty powerful and compelling story of why do we do what we do.

It’s a great way to re-imagine and inspire our transformation to a productivity and platform company in a Mobile-first, Cloud-first world. And, it’s a very simple story around productivity and empowerment that inspires and drives people in various roles and responsibilities to co-create the future in a profound way.

What is your simple story for how you re-imagine you or your business in a Mobile-First, Cloud-First world?

I really liked the simple little story around why we are moving to the Cloud:

“Three words: Agility, economics and innovation. Cloud technology satisfies the CEO's desire for greater business agility, the CFO's desire to streamline operations, and the CMO's desire for a more innovative way to engage customers.”

Some people move to the Cloud because they see an ROI play. Others move because they see opportunity cost. Others move simply because they don’t want to be left behind.

The most common reason I see is business agility and to stay relevant in today’s world.

Imagine motivational wisdom of the ages and modern sages right at your fingertips all on one page. I included motivational quotes from Bruce Lee, Tony Robbins, Winston Churchill, Waldo Emerson, Jim Rohn, and more.

See if you can find at least three motivational quotes that you can take with you on the road of life, to help you deal with setbacks and challenges, and to unleash your inner-awesome.

Getting Started with Motivational Quotes

I’ll start you off. If you don’t already have these in your personal motivational quotes collection, here are a few that I draw from often:

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” — Winston Churchill

“When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.” -Henry David Thoreau

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”— Howard Thurman

How’s that for a starter set?

Build Better Motivational Thought Habits

You can train your brain with motivational mantras. Our thoughts are habits. If you want to build better thought habits, then feed on some of the best motivational quotes of all time.

“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Positive thinking won’t let you do anything but it will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” -– Zig Ziglar

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you train yourself well, you won’t entirely eliminate motivational setbacks, but you’ll be able to defeat procrastination, and you’ll be able to bounce back faster when you find yourself in a slump. Motivation is a skill you can build, and it will serve you well, in work and life.

You Create Your Future

The most important motivational concept to hold on to is the idea that you create your future. Or, as Wayne Dyer puts it:

“Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.”

So go for the bold, and get your game face on.

If you need some help kick-starting your fire, stroll through the motivational quotes a few times until something really sinks in or clicks for you. Life’s better with the right words, and there are just the right words already out there, just waiting to be found.

If you’ve seen my collection of inspirational quotes before, it’s completely revamped. It should be much easier to browse all of the inspirational quotes now so you can see some old familiar quotes that you may have heard of long ago, as well as many inspirational quotes, you have never heard of before.

Dive in, explore the collection of inspirational quotes, and see if you can find at least three inspirational quotes that breathe new life into your moment, your day, your work, or anything you do.

The Power of Inspirational Quotes

Inspirational quotes can help us move mountains. The right inspirational words and ideas can help us boldly go where we have not gone before, as well as conquer our fears and soar to new heights.

Or, the right inspirational quote can simply help us roar a little louder inside, when we need it most.

Life isn’t always a bowl of cherries. And work can be an incredible challenge. And sometimes, even our best laid plans, go up in flames.

So having a repertoire of inspirational quotes and inspiring mantras at your mental fingertips can help you roll with the punches and keep going.

One of the most important inspirational ideas I learned early on goes like this:

Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

It helped me turn trials into triumphs, and eventually learn to take on big challenges as a way to grow.

Another inspirational idea that really helped me find my way forward is by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, it goes like this:

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Whenever I went on a new journey, down an unfamiliar path, it helped remind me that I don’t always need a trail, and that many times, it’s about blazing my own trail.

The power of inspirational quotes is their power to light a fire inside and fan the flames until we go and blaze our trail that leaves our self, and others, in awe.

What Lies Within Us

Perhaps, the greatest inspirational quote of all time is another amazing quote by Emerson:

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

It’s an awe-inspiring reminder to not only do what makes us come alive, but to realize our potential and unleash what we are capable of.

It’s Better to Burn Out, then Fade Away

So many inspirational quotes remind us that life is short and that we have to go for it. But maybe George Bernard Shaw said it best:

“I want to be all used up when I die.”

One quote that I think about often is by Seth Godin:

“Life is like skiing. Just like skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. It’s to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.”

It’s all about making the journey worth it.

When It’s Over

What do you do when it’s over. It all depends. Dr. Seuss has an interesting twist:

A while back I put together a comprehensive collection of love quotes. It’s a combination of the wisdom of the ages + modern sages. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I gave it a good revamp. Here it is:

It's a serious collection of love quotes and includes lessons from the likes of Lucille Ball, Shakespeare, Socrates, and even The Princess Bride.

How I Organized the Categories for Love Quotes

I organized the quotes into a set of buckets: Beauty Broken Hearts and Loss Falling in Love Fear and Love Fun and Love Kissing Love and Life Significance and Meaning The Power of Love True Love

I think there’s a little something for everyone among the various buckets. If you walk away with three new quotes that make you feel a little lighter, put a little skip in your step, or help you see love in a new light, then mission accomplished.

Think of Love as Warmth and Connection

This might not seem like a big deal, but if you knew all the benefits for your heart, brain, bodily processes, and even your life span, you might think twice.

You might be surprised by how much your career can be limited if you don’t balance connection with conviction. It’s not uncommon to hear a lot of turning points in the careers of developers, program managers, IT leaders, and business leaders that changed their game, when they changed their heart.

In fact, on one of the teams I was on, the original mantra was “business before technology”, but people in the halls started to say, “people before business, business before technology” to remind people of what makes business go round.

When people treat each other better, work and life get better.

Love Quotes Help with Insights and Actions

Here are a few of my favorite love quotes from the collection …

“Love is like heaven, but it can hurt like hell.” – Unknown

“Love is not a feeling, it’s an ability.” — Dan in Real Life

“There is a place you can touch a woman that will drive her crazy. Her heart.” — Milk Money

“Hearts will be practical only when they are made unbreakable.” – The Wizard of Oz

“Things are beautiful if you love them.” – Jean Anouilh

“Life is messy. Love is messier.” – Catch and Release

“To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.” – Unknown

I find these buckets are useful for organizing principles, patterns, practices, and even quotes. There are a lot of productivity quotes, so using this frame helps group the quotes into more manageable themes.

The Ultimate Formula for Personal Productivity

It sounds so simple when I say it now, but it took me a while to figure out the ultimate formula for personal productivity. Here’s the formula:

Work on the right things, at the right time, the right way, with the right energy.

In other words, start with the right things. Trim your tree of opportunity and focus on the right branches and leaves that will bear the most fruit. Work on these things at the right time. It’s easy to miss windows of opportunity and time changes what’s valued. We also have better times in the day to work on things than others. Work on things the right way. This is really about using better techniques. If have the wrong technique, then throwing hours and effort at something will just waste your time. Lastly, work on things with the right energy. Your energy is your force multiplier since you won’t get more time in the day.

A simple way to think of the way to optimize your productivity is to use your best energy for your best results.

I share a simple system and a comprehensive set of proven practices for personal productivity in my book, Getting Results the Agile Way. (It’s been a best seller in time management, and it helps you master productivity, time management, and work-life balance.)

Productivity Strategies

Believe it or not, quotes are not just neat and fun little sayings. The right quotes are actually pithy ways to share strategies and insights. They can completely change your game.

Quotas and quantity can help you achieve quality. (If you learn from your process and apply it.)

Value is in the eye of the beholder and the stakeholder.

Find better techniques to multiply your results.

Enjoy the process.

Spend more time in your strengths, and less time in your weaknesses.

Pair up to amplify your talents and capabilities.

Focus on continuous improvement.

Manage your energy, not time.

Reduce the time you spend and you’ll innovate in your process.

Use timeboxing to invest time more intelligently. (Set limits and boundaries so you don’t over-spend in the wrong areas of your life.)

Work smarter, not harder.

Change your approach when it’s not working.

Test your results.

Productivity is Power

There are many ways to think about productivity. I like to think of productivity as power. I think of power as the ability to take action. When you exercise your ability to take action and concentrate your effort and your focus, you can make amazing things happen in work and life.

Productivity is a powerful tool in your toolbox for personal empowerment.

As with anything, make sure you use the right tool for the job. And that’s why I continue to fill my toolbox with several tools. Otherwise, if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

It's a serious collection of personal development quotes and includes lessons from the likes of Buddha, Covey, Emerson, Gandhi, Robbins, Ziglar, and more.

Personal Development is a Way to Realize Your Potential

Personal development is a process for life where you improve your awareness, your skills, your abilities, and your potential. Personal development shapes your growth by developing your strengths, reducing your liabilities, and expanding what you’re capable of.

You improve your potential through self-awareness, habits, practice, and feedback.

Awareness is Half the Battle

A big part of personal development is simply awareness. For example, when you know your Myers & Briggs Personality Type, you gain insight into whether you outwardly or inwardly focused, how you prefer to take in information, how you prefer to make decisions, and how you prefer to live your outer life.

Aside from better understanding your own patterns, you can also use it to understand other people’s behavior preferences, and you can adapt your style. If you see somebody staring blankly at you during your presentation, it doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged. They might just be an introvert processing the information in their own quiet way.

If you know your Conflict Style, you can tailor and adapt it to the situation, as well as better understand the mode that others are operating in.

There are many models and tools for self-awareness, but the goal is the same: learn how to be more effective in more situations based on your individual strengths, abilities, and experience.

Action is the Other Half

Personal development is a verb. You need to take action. All the knowledge in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t apply it. Even thoughts are habits that we haven’t learned how to measure. When you apply what you learn, you can adjust what you learn based on feedback and results.

If you keep in mind that personal development is about continuously improving your thinking, feeling, and doing, then it’s easier to stay focused and to evaluate your results.

You can also approach personal development in a number of ways. Just like martial arts, there are hard-styles and there are soft-styles. In my experience, it helps to balance and blend hard-core skill building along with building the soft skills, especially interpersonal skills and your emotional intelligence.

Personal Development Requires a Growth Mindset

If you want to grow, you have to believe you can.

If you adopt a Growth Mindset, you can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area of work and life.

In the book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, author Carol Dweck shares a lot of science and stories around how our mindset limits or enables our growth. If we believe that our abilities are fixed traits, and that we are either good or bad at something, then we have a Fixed Mindset.

If, on the other hand, you believe that you can get better through skills development, then you have a Growth Mindset.

If you’ve ever been in any sort of elite training, or specialized skills development or had a great mentor that provides deep feedback, it should be more than obvious to you how much growth and greatness is possible.

Adapting is the Key to Personal Development Success

So if you have a Growth Mindset, and you practice personal development, and you develop your self-awareness, then what will hold you back?

Simple. The inability or lack of willingness for you to change your approach.

Darwin taught us that nature favors the flexible and Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

And yet, how many people get stuck in a rut or hold themselves back through limiting thought patterns or behaviors?

One of the greatest things you can possible do for your future success is to learn how to change your approach with skill.

I could say so much more about personal development but at this point, I’d rather share what some of the greatest giants in personal development have had to say.

And if you want a jumpstart in agile personal development, check out my best-selling book on productivity: Getting Results the Agile Way. It’s a simple system for meaningful results, and it’s a way to use personal development to think better, feel better, and do better in all areas of your life.

It's a serious collection of leadership quotes and includes lessons from the likes of John Maxwell, Jim Rohn, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and more.

Leadership is Influence

John Maxwell said it best when he defined leadership as influence. Tom Peters added a powerful twist to leadership when he said that leadership is not about creating followers—it’s about creating more leaders.

I like to think of leadership in terms of incremental spheres of influence starting with personal or self-leadership, followed by team leadership, followed by organizational leadership, etc. Effectively, you can expand your sphere of influence, but none of it really works, if you can’t lead yourself first.

Leadership is Multi-Faceted (Just Like You)

I also like to think about the various aspects of leadership, such as Courage, Challenges, Character, Communication, Connection, Conviction, Credibility, Encouragement, Failure, Fear, Heart, Influence, Inspiration, Learning, Self-Leadership, Servant-Leadership, Teamwork, and Vision. As such, I’ve used these categories to help put the leadership quotes into a meaningful collection with simple themes.

I’ve also included special sections on What is Leadership, Leadership Defined, and Leading by Example.

Sometimes the Source is More Interesting than the Punch line

While I haven’t counted the leadership quotes, there are a lot. But they are well-organized and easy to scan. You’ll notice how the names of famous people that said the leadership quote will pop out at you. I bolded the names for extra impact and to help you quickly jump to interesting people, to see what they have to say about the art and science of leadership.

I bet you can find at least three leadership quotes that you can use on a daily basis to think a little better, feel a little better, or do a little better.

Leadership is Everyone’s Job

For those of you that think that leadership is something that other people do, or something that gets done to you, or that leadership is a position, I’ll share the words of John Maxwell on this topic:

“A great leader’s courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.” — John Maxwell

In fact, if you’ve never seen it before or need a quick reminder that everyone is a leader, this is a great video that makes the point hit home:

It’s one of those cool, simple, cartoon videos that shows how leadership is everyone’s job and that without that philosophy, people, systems, organizations, etc. all fail.

The world moves too fast and things change too much to wait for somebody at the top to tell you what to do. The closer you are to where the action is, the more context you have, and the more insight you can use to make better decisions and get better results.

Leadership is a body of principles, patterns, and practices that you can use to empower yourself, and others, with skill.

Just like a Jedi, your force gets stronger the more you use it.

If You Want to Grow Your Leadership, Then Give Your Power Away

But always remember the surprise about leadership – the more you give your power away, the more power that comes back to you.

It’s not Karma. It’s caring. And it’s contagious.

(As Brian Tracy would say, the three C’s of leadership are Consideration,Caring,and Courtesy.)

Well, maybe it is like Karma in that what goes around, comes around, and leadership amplifies when you share it with people and help everyone become all that they are capable of.

I've completely overhauled my collection of happiness quotes. It was time for a revamp. Hear what Charlie Brown, Dale Carnegie, Aristotle, Confucius, and more have to say about the art and skill of happiness.

It should be a lot easier to read and a lot easier to use. And it’s exhaustive, so you’ll most likely find at lead a few quotes you’ve never heard before. While I have some general quotes on happiness, I also organized my happiness quotes collection into key themes: What is Happiness, Skilled Happiness, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Why Happiness Quotes?

Well, life happens. And life has it’s ups and downs, whether you’re an executive, an IT leader, a Program Manager, a developer, or you name it.

As the world changes faster around us, our thoughts shape our work and life.

When people aren’t happy, they don’t work well. You can argue it’s the job, but a study in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology showed that it’s the other way around:

Happiness leads to job satisfaction.

They found that the causal relationship between subjective-well being to job satisfaction was stronger than the causal relationship from job satisfaction to subjective well-being.

It helps explain why one person’s treasure is another’s trash.

The HOW of Happiness

If you arm yourself with a great set of happiness quotes, you’ll find ways think better. Some of the quotes are actually profound wisdom distilled into a sentence. Some are just entertaining.

Sometimes it just helps to validate your thinking. For example, are you worried that every time you start to feel happy that something will go wrong? You are not alone. Charlie Brown feels the same way:

I think you’ll find a great deal of wisdom within the quotes and they will help you find your own personal HOW of happiness. While happiness can be a team sport, it’s really an individual skill that you learn to master over a lifetime. While you may not end up as a shiny, happy Pollyanna, you can find ways to raise your frustration tolerance, enjoy more of your moments, and bounce back faster when life throws you the proverbial curve ball.

The Secret of Happiness

While some might say that the secret of happiness is finding your one thing, I think it’s more than that. As a mentor at Microsoft, I coach a lot of individuals on personal effectiveness, and a big part of it, is figuring out how to do what makes you come alive.

But there’s actually more to the story.

The ultimate way to find your happiness is to treat happiness like a verb, right here and right now, and find ways to spend more time in your values, while in the service of others or some greater good. And, as Zig Ziglar would say, “Enjoy the price of success.”

What is Agile Results all about? What are the most important keys to using Agile Results to master productivity, time management, and work-life balance?

If you've ever wondered what Getting Results the Agile Way is all about, or want to know how to make the most of the book, this is it. I answer these questions and more in my interview with The Entrepreneur's Library on Getting Results the Agile Way:

If the reader could only take one concept/principle/action item out of the entire book, what would you want that to be?

Do you have a favorite quote from your book?

If there was only one book you recommend to our listeners based on the way it has impacted your life, what would that be?

Wade also gives me a chance to give a walkthrough of the book, Getting Results the Agile Way, where I explain how to make the most of the book, and what each section is really about.

It’s a unique chance to get the philosophy behind Agile Results and why it’s really a personal results system for work and life. It’s not a system that you break yourself against. Instead, it’s a simple system for meaningful results that supports you and the way you work. It helps you optimize your productivity by focusing on the wins that matter, playing to your strengths, and using your best energy for your best results.

An amazing thing happens when you become more focused and productive …

You get more out of life.

And you can get more done in a day than other people get done all week.

I’ve been talking to people in the halls about what they learned about goals from last year, and what they are going to do differently this year. We’ve had chats about New Years Resolutions, habits, goals, and big dreams. (My theme is Dream Big for 2015.)

Here are a few of the insights that I’ve been sharing with people that really seems to create a lot clarity:

Dream big first, then create your goals. Too many people start with goals, but miss the dream that holds everything together. The dream is the backdrop and it needs to inspire you and pull your forward. Your dream needs to be actionable and believable, and it needs to reflect your passion and your purpose.

There are three types of actions: habits, goals, and inspired actions. Habits can help support our goals and reach our dreams. Goals are really the above and beyond that we set our sights on and help us funnel and focus our energy to reach meaningful milestones. They take deliberate focus and intent. You don’t randomly learn to play the violin with skill. It takes goals. Inspired actions are the flashes of insight and moments of brilliance.

People mess up by focusing on goals, but not having any habits that support them. For example, if I have an extreme fitness goal, but I have the ice-cream habit, I might not reach my goals. Or, if I want to be an early bird, but I have the party-all-night long, or a I’m a late-night reader, that might not work out so well.

People mess up on their habits when they have no goals. They might inch their way forward, but they can easily spend an entire year, and not actually have anything significant or meaningful for themselves, because they never took the chance to dream big, or set a goal they cared about. So while they’ve made progress, they didn’t make any real pop. Their life was slow and steady. In some cases, this is great, if all they wanted. But I also know people that feel like they wasted the year, because they didn’t do what they knew they were capable of, or wanted to achieve.

People can build habits that help them reach new goals. Some people I knew have built fantastic habits. They put a strong foundation in place that helps them reach for more. They grow better, faster, stronger, and more powerful. In my own experience, I had some extreme fitness goals, but I started with a few healthy habits. My best one is wake up, work out. I just do it. I do a 30 minute workout. I don’t have to think about it, it’s just part of my day like brushing my teeth. Since it’s a habit, I keep doing it, so I get better over time. When I first started the workout, I sucked. I repeated the same workout three times, but by the third time, I was on fire. And, since it’s a habit, it’s there for me, as a staple in my day, and, in reality, the most empowering part of my day. It boosts me and gives me energy that makes everything else in my day, way easier, much easier to deal with, and I can do things in half the time, or in some cases 10X.

Maybe the most important insight is that while you don’t need goals to make your habits effective, it’s really easy to spend a year, and then wonder where the year went, without the meaningful milestones to look back on. That said, I’ve had a few years, where I simply focused on habits without specific goals, but I always had a vision for a better me, or a better future in mind (more like a direction than a destination.)

As I’ve taken friends and colleagues through some of my learnings over the holidays, regarding habits, dreams, and goals, I’ve had a few people say that I should put it all together and share it, since it might help more people add some clarity to setting and achieving their goals.

The overall goal of the site was to help you master productivity, master time management, and achieve work life balance. The idea was that by spending a little time each day, you would get back lots of time and energy and produce better results. And we all need an edge in work and life.

How to create a simple system your can use for getting great results in work and life

How to use proven practices to master time management, motivation, and personal productivity

How to embrace change and get better results in any situation

How to triple your personal productivity

How to focus and direct your attention with skill

How to use your strengths to create a powerful edge for getting results

How to change a habit and make it stick

How to achieve better work-life balance and spend more time doing the things you love

So if you’re struggling with any of the above, you might find just the piece of advice or the one or two ideas that help you find your breakthrough.

The Making of 30 Days of Getting Results

Behind the scenes, when I wrote each of the 30 days, I gave myself a 20-minute time limit (a 20-minute timebox for you in the know.) I would then write as if writing to somebody where I only had a small window of time to help them as best I could to achieve better results, in any situation.

It might seem like the first few days start slow, but things pick up from there pretty fast. Also, it’s self-paced so you can hop around to any particular day that you think you need the most.

I’ve had many people tell me that it was the course that they needed that helped them set and achieve better goals, while also helping them make new habits and break bad habits. It’s also helped them find more energy as well as enjoy more of the things that they do. It’s also helped them find ways to spend more time in their strengths and do what makes them come alive.

I will say that the user experience isn’t that great. The site was a test and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on the site design. That said, it’s pretty straightforward. When you go to the home page at 30 Days of Getting Results, you’ll see a brief intro and overview, and then you can dive in from there, by either starting with Day 1: Take a Tour of Agile Results, or by clicking through the 30 Days on the left-hand side of the menu.

The course is free. Hopefully that doesn’t de-value it. It has a lot of the lessons you would learn in some of the most advanced productivity and time management training.

The Structure of the Daily Lessons

The structure of each day is the same. It includes an outcome, a lesson, and an assignment. And right up front, I include a relevant quote and picture. Here is an example of Day 24 – Bounce Back with Skill:

Quote:

“Life is not about how fast you run, or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.” – Anonymous

Your Outcome:

Your Outcome: Bounce back with skill and roll with the punches. Learn to draw from multiple sources of strength and energy, including your mind, body, emotions, and spirit.

Lesson

Welcome to day 24 of 30 Days of Getting Results, based on my book, Getting Results the Agile Way. In day 23, you learned how to design your week with skill to get a fresh start, establish routines that support and renew you, and spend more time on the things that count for you. Today, we learn how to bounce back with skill. Bouncing back with skill helps us roll with the punches, refuel our bodies, and keep our spark alive. It’s how we keep our engine going when the rest of us says “we can’t” and it’s how we “shut down” or “turn it off” so we can bounce back stronger. (For the rest of the lesson, see Day 24 – Bounce Back with Skill … )

Assignment

Today’s Assignment

Find one of your past victories in life and add that to your mental flip book of scenes to draw from when you need it most.

Find one metaphor to help you to represent how you bounce back in life.

Find one song or one saying to have in your mind that you can use as a one-liner reminder to take the right actions when it counts. For example, one that some people like is “Stand strong when tested.”

Get Started with 30 Days of Getting Results

If you want to start off well for 2015, and you have big dreams and big goals in mind, then give 30 Days of Getting Results a try:

If you want to take it slow and steady, then just try one lesson each day. If you’re feeling gung-ho, then see how quickly you can make it through all 30 at your own pace.

To help you stay on track, if you take the slow and steady route, build the habit by adding a simple reminder to your calendar in the morning to go and take the next lesson. Do it Monday through Friday and take the weekends off.

It was worth cleaning up because John Maxwell is one of the deepest thinkers in the leadership space. He’s published more than 50 books on leadership and he lives and breathes leadership in business and in life.

When I first started studying leadership long ago, John Maxwell’s definition of leadership was the most precise I found:

“Leadership is influence.”

As I began to dig through his work, I was amazed at the nuggets and gems and words of wisdom that he shared in so many books. I started with Your Road Map for Success. I think my next book was The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Ironically, I didn’t realize it was the same author until I started to notice on my shelf that I had a growing collection of leadership books, all by John Maxwell.

It was like finding the leadership Sherpa.

Sure enough, over the years, he continued to fill the shelves at Barnes & Nobles, with book after book on all the various nooks and crannies of leadership.

This was about the same time that I noticed how Edward de Bono had filled the shelves with books on thinking. I realized that some people really share there life’s work as a rich library that is a timeless gift for the world. I also realized that it really helps people stand out in their field or discipline when they contribute so many guides and guidance to the art and science of whatever their specific focus is.

What I like about John Maxwell’s work is that it’s plain English and down to Earth. He writes in a very conversational way, and you can actually see his own progress throughout his books. In Your Road Map for Success, it’s a great example of how he doesn’t treat leadership as something that comes naturally. He works hard at it, to build his own knowledge base of patterns, practices, ideas, concepts, and inspirational stories.

While he’s created a wealth of wisdom to help advance the practice of leadership, I think perhaps his greatest contribution is The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. It’s truly a work of art, and he does an amazing job of distilling down the principles that serve as the backbone of effective leadership.

It’s the story of how I figured out how to do more of what makes me come alive, and how to share my unique value with the world.

It’s a journey, but this story is a look backwards, and how it helped me shape my path forward.

I included some of the key questions I asked, as well as some of the key resources I used to get a new lens on work and life.

Life can really be a game of chutes and ladders, depending on the questions you ask, the choices you make, and the actions you take.

I think one of the biggest challenges we have in life, is a very personal one. It’s the challenge of finding our voice. It’s the challenge of finding our passion, our purpose, and our talents. It’s the challenge of becoming all that we’re capable of. And, it’s the challenge of how to make the most of what we’ve got, while helping others in our unique way.

The other big challenge is avoiding regret, learning to live with regret, or learning how to live without regret. What we regret the most, are the things we have a chance to change. It’s our opportunities lost. Or, to put it another way, we regret the things we didn’t do. That can include things like not being true to ourselves, not expressing our feelings, not staying in touch with friends, or not letting ourselves be happier.

The top regrets in life based on research are: education, career, romance, parenting, self-improvement, leisure, finance, health, friends, spirituality, and community. Education is the top regret because it impacts so many areas of our life, and it’s within our control.

The way I learned to write my story forward is to combine a combination of answering the following questions on an on-gong basis:

Who do I want to be and what experiences do I want to create?

Am I giving my best where you have my best to give?

Am I living my values?

Am I saying “Yes” to opportunities?

Am I sharing what I think and feel to the people in my life?

Transformation is a journey of challenges and changes. And that’s where our greatest growth comes from.

January is a great time to focus on what you want out of this year. As you close out last year, you can reflect on what went well and what things you could improve. Focus on the growth.

January is also a great time to build some momentum. January and December are the bookends for your year. It’s interesting how they are both a month apart and a year apart.

What you fill that year with, is your opportunity.

If you’re having a hard time remembering what it means to dream big, I put together a collection of dream big quotes to rekindle your imagination.

I’ve also put together a set of posts to help you create goals with skill:

10 Reasons that Stop You from Reaching Your Goals - I see so many people who achieve their goals, and so many people who don’t. I thought it would be helpful to nail down why so many people don’t achieve their goals, even when they have such good intentions.

Are You Living Your Dreams? - Here is a blurb I found from Dr. Lisa Christiansen that helps remind us to dream big, dream often, and live our dreams.

Goal-Setting vs. Goal-Planning - Most people don’t step into what achieving their goal would actually take, so they get frustrated or disheartened when they bump into the first obstacles. Worse, they usually don’t align their schedule and their habits or environment to help them. They want their goals, they think about their goals, but they don’t put enough structure in place to support them when they need it most, especially if it’s a big habit change. Don’t let this be you.

How Brian Tracy Sets Goals - Brian Tracy has an twelve-step goal-setting methodology that he’s taught to more than a million people. If you follow his approach … You will amaze yourself. With his goal-setting methodology, he’s seen people transform. They are astounded by what they start to accomplish. They become a more powerful, positive, and effective person. They feel like a winner every hour of the day. They have a tremendous sense of personal control and direction. They have more energy and enthusiasm.

How John Maxwell Sets Goals - John Maxwell is an internationally recognized leadership expert, speaker, and author. And, one of his specialties is turning dreams into reality through a simple process of setting goals.

How Tony Robbins Sets Goals - This goal-setting approach is one of the most effective ways to motivate you from the inside out and move you to action, so if you have a case of the blahs, or if you want big changes in your life this might just be your answer.

How Tony Robbins Transformed His Life with Goals - Tony Robbins wanted to change his life with a passion. He had hit rock bottom. He was frustrated and feeling like a failure. He was physically, emotionally, spiritually, and financially “broke.” He was alone and almost 40 pounds over-weight. He was living in a small, studio apartment where he had to wash his dishes in the bathtub, because there was no kitchen. He wanted out.

The Power of Dreams - John Maxwell shares what he’s learned about the power of dreams to shape our goals, to shape our work, and to shape our lives.

The Real Price of Your Dreams - Tony Robbins walks through helping a young entrepreneur translate their dream of living like a billionaire into what their lifestyle might actually cost.

One of the most helpful things I’ve found with goal setting, is to start with 3 dreams or 3 wins for the year. I learned this while I was putting together Getting Results the Agile Way: A Personal Results System for Work and Life. As my story goes, I got frustrated and bogged down by a heavy goal process and lost in creating SMART goals. I finally stepped back and just asked myself, what are Three Wins or Three Outcomes that I want out of this year? The first things that came to mind were 1) ship my book, 2) get to my fighting weight, and 3) take an epic adventure.

It wasn’t scientific, but it was significant, and it was simple. But most of all, it was empowering.

In retrospect, it seems so obvious now, but what I was missing in my goals was the part that always needs to happen first: Dream big. We need to first put our dreams on the table because that’s where meaningful goals are born from. It’s the dreams that make our goals a force to be reckoned with. Really, goals are just a way to break our dreams down into chunks of change we can deal with, and to help guide us on our journey towards the end in mind. That’s why we have to keep pushing our dreams beyond our limits. That way we don’t try to push ourselves with our goals. Instead, we pull ourselves with our dreams.

If you want to know how to get started with Agile Results, before you get the book, you can use the Agile Results QuickStart guide. You can use it to create your personal results system. It’s a simple system, but a powerful one. Individuals, teams, and leaders use it to bring out their best and to make the mot of what they’ve got.

To give you a quick example, if you want to rise above the noise of your day, just take a quick pause, and write down Three Wins that you want out of today. If you’re day is pretty tough, you might say, “great breakfast, great lunch, great dinner.” We have those days. Or, if you’re feeling pretty good, you might say, “ship feature X” or “clear my backlog” or “finish my presentation” or “win a raving fan”, etc.

It sounds simple but by having Three Wins to hold onto for today, it helps you focus. It helps you prioritize. And it helps you get back on track, when you get off track. It also gives you a quick way to feel good about your achievements at the end of the day, because you can actually name them. They are your private victories.

So, if you want to practice Agile Results, just remember to think in threes: Three Wins for the Day, Three Wins for the Week, Three Wins for the Month, Three Wins for the Year. It will help you funnel and focus your time and energy on meaningful results that matter. And, you’ll build momentum a moment at a time, as you respond to challenges, exercises your choices, and drive your changes in work and in life.

How are we measuring the festive magic? Using cloud-based Dynamics social analytics software.

Via the There’s Magic in the Air site:

”At Virgin Atlantic we love the festive season and so do lots of our customers.

So this year, we wanted to see how much ‘festive magic’ our customers and employees are creating around the world.

Partnering with our friends at Microsoft, we're using cloud based Dynamics social analytics software to calculate the volume and sentiment of social posts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. We’re analyzing the posts for positive mentions of keywords like ‘Christmas,’ ‘magic’ and ‘reindeer.’ So we can understand how much of that festive magic is being generated every day until 7January, 2015.

We're doing this in a totally anonymous way, and we're not storing any personal information. We just want to understand how much magic we're collectively creating during this period.”

What a fun and festive way to show software in action, and use technology to light up the holiday season.

I’ve put together a roundup of the best productivity books that have helped me get better results in work and life. It contains many of the same books that I recommend to people and teams that I mentor. Here is the list:

It has a lot of books. To be productive, it takes a lot of skills, and a lot of self-mastery. And, you never know which book is going to do it for you.

I organize the productivity books in a scenario-based way:

Top 10 Best Productivity Books

Getting Started

Advanced Productivity

Action

Delegation

Drive, Energy, and Motivation

Focus

Goals

Learning and School

Procrastination

Teams and Organizations

To-Do Lists

Work-Life Balance

At the end of the list, I included all the books in a simple, flat A-Z list so you can quickly check against your own productivity book collection to see if I have mentioned books that you don’t have or don’t know about.

I’ve put this list of productivity books together to give you an unfair advantage. Competition can be fierce. Remember that the best person to always compete against is you—find ways to be better, faster, or cheaper, when it comes to making things happen. It’s how you stay in the game, and it’s how you change your game.

In fact, productivity is a backbone for surviving and thriving. Yeah, it’s a big deal.

Also, bear in mind that the big idea behind extreme productivity, or effective productivity is to focus on learning and growth. If you have a growth mindset, you’ll win in the long-run, because you’ll get better over time, and you can compound your effort. Also, learn to embrace the effort, and to love the work you do, or love the way you do it.

Your work is the ultimate self-expression, and the legacy you leave behind, can be an inspiration for yourself, as well as for others.

My Productivity Books page will be a living catalog of the books I draw from, and it’s part of my bigger Great Books collection, where I share the world’s best books for insight and action on business, career, leadership, personal development, and more.

I know there are a lot of productivity books on my list. If I can only recommend one, I start people off with Getting Results the Agile Way. I wrote it specifically to help people get better results in work and life with a simple system I developed over time in extreme scenarios. It integrates proven practices for personal productivity, as well as positive psychology, project management, sports science, and more in terms of achieving high-performance with flow. And, it’s easy to get started (Here is the Agile Results QuickStart.)

I believe in the power of books to change lives. Productivity is just one area, but it’s an area that impacts all the other major areas of our life.

If you can master productivity, you can know more, be more, and achieve more.

And, if you balance that with living your values, making an impact, and enjoying the journey, that is the key to living la vida buena.

Microsoft and Virgin help land Santa on top of a plane at 30,000 feet. If you’ve been wondering where Santa’s been, he landed on top of a Virgin Atlantic plane and did a photo shoot with the passengers.

Microsoft teamed up with Richard Branson and Virgin Atlantic to bring the magic of Christmas to life. In the world’s first 4D experience in flight, Santa Claus appears to land on top of a Virgin Atlantic plane at 30,000 feet.

How’s that for some fancy flying with modern technology?!

Each passenger was also given a Windows tablet so they could track Father Christmas and chat with him during the flight.

Here’s the video of Santa landing on top of the plane and visiting with the passengers:

Here’s a simple visual that I whiteboard when I lead workshops for business transformation.

The Sweet Spot is where customer “demand” meets Microsoft “supply.”

I’m not a fan of product pushers or product pushing. I’m a fan of creating “pull.”

In order for customers to pull-through any product, platform, or service, you need to know the customer’s pains, needs, and desired outcomes. Without customer empathy, you’re not relevant.

This is a simple visual, but a powerful one.

When you have good representation of the voice of the customer, you can really identity problems worth solving. It always comes down to pains, needs, opportunities, and desired outcomes. In short, I always just say pains, needs, and desired outcomes so that people can remember it easily.

To make it real, we use scenarios to tell a simple story of a customer’s pain, needs, and desired outcomes. We use our friends in the field working with customers to give us real stories of real pain.

Here is an example Scenario Narrative where a company is struggling in creating products that its customers care about …

As you can see, the Current State is a pretty good story of pain, that a lot of business leaders and product owners can identify with. For some, it’s all too real, because it is their story and they can see themselves in it.

In the Desired Future State, it’s a pretty good story of what success would look like. It paints a pretty simple picture of what would be an ideal scenario …. a future possibility.

Here is an example of a Solution Storyboard, where we paint a simple picture of that Desired Future State, or more precisely, a Future Capability Vision. It’s this Future Capability Vision that shows how, with the right capabilities, the customer can address their pains, needs, and desired outcomes.

The beauty of this approach is that it’s product and technology agnostic. It’s all about building capabilities.

From there, with a good understanding of the pains, needs, and desired outcomes, it’s super easy to overlay relevant products, technologies, consulting services, etc.

And then, rather than trying to do a product “push”, it becomes a product “pull” because it connects with customers in a very deep, very real, very relevant way.

I’m always of fan of hearing about how Softies change the world, inside and outside of Microsoft.

I was reading Blind Ambition: How to Envision Your Limitless Potential and Achieve the Success You Want by Patricia Walsh. It’s an inspirational story, as well as an insightful read if you are looking for ways to up your game or get the edge in work and life.

Walsh is a former Softie. More than that, she has raced in marathons, ultra-marathons and IRONMAN triathlons. In 2011, Walsh set a new world record for blind triathletes, shattering the previous male and female records by over 50 minutes.

Pretty impressive.

She left Microsoft to start her own business, pursuit her speaking career, and train as a world-class athlete.

She set a high-bar.

But she also set a great example. Walsh wanted to help light the way for others to show them that they can be limitless if they set goals, put in the work, and don’t let fear or failures hold them back.

And most importantly, don’t put limits on yourself, and don’t fall into the trap of the limits that others put on you.